In the following essay, Duncan attempts to place Fuentes's story "Chac Mool" within the tradition of "fantastic" literature as the term is defined by the critic Tzvetan Todorov. While Todorov reserves the genre for certain writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Duncan believes that "Chac Mool" and the work of other Latin American writers also fit Todorov's definition of fantastic literature.

Tzvetan Todorov, in his landmark study The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre [1975], offers one of the most restrictive definitions of the fantastic to date. Unlike some others who have bandied this term about and contributed to a vague and ambiguous usage of it, Todorov insists on limiting the type of literature which can properly be called fantastic. Perhaps...